Closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial turned into a battle of credibility, with OpenAI presenting evidence in order while Musk’s side stumbled.
Closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial felt less like a careful legal reckoning and more like the kind of verbal demolition derby people only watch because it is hard to look away.
Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, repeatedly fumbled during his remarks.. At one point, he referred to Greg Brockman, a co-defendant, as Greg Altman.. He also made an incorrect claim that Musk was not seeking money, a point the judge had to correct.. For all the emphasis on unreliability from Musk’s team. the presentation offered little in the way of support for Musk’s actual legal claims.
OpenAI’s attorney, Sarah Eddy, took a steadier approach.. Rather than trying to build credibility through argument, she laid out a large body of evidence in chronological order.. The courtroom. by contrast. had been full of missed details and shifting claims. and Eddy landed a sharp moment with a line attributed to Musk: “Even the mother of his children can’t back his story.”
When William Savitt took over after Eddy, the focus tightened further. He highlighted how often Musk “didn’t recall” critical details and questioned how a sophisticated businessman could miss or misunderstand a four-page term sheet that OpenAI had sent to him.
At that stage, the trial’s stated purpose seemed almost incidental to the spectacle around it.. The proceedings repeatedly circled back to accusations about trust. and to the question of who could be believed on key points.. By the end. the impression was that the courtroom had largely delivered gossip dressed as evidence. and little clarity on what a clean legal win would actually look like.
The lingering takeaway for many observers, though, was not the procedural drama. It was Elon Musk’s positioning on AI itself.
Throughout the case. Musk argued that OpenAI would not succeed. a view he has repeated elsewhere and backed with years of effort to undermine it.. He has tried. repeatedly. to “kneecap” OpenAI and to recruit its researchers. and the record discussed in court includes at least one prominent success for Musk: the departure of Andrej Karpathy. described here as a founding team member who Musk lured to Tesla.
But the piece driving the author’s concern was how that stance has played out beyond the courtroom.. xAI. presented as the vehicle for Musk’s own AI push. is described as a money-consuming operation tied to SpaceX. struggling to retain researchers.. The author also points to a planned data center that. in this telling. would not be used for xAI after all. with a deal instead going to Anthropic.. There is also mention that xAI might buy Cursor. an effort framed as a way to compete with the programming-focused products put forward by Anthropic and OpenAI.
On top of those business signals. the author says xAI’s enterprise customers have been “strong-armed” into using it. including the US government and private companies.. And the piece points to Grok—referred to here as “MechaHitler. ” a bespoke CSAM machine—arguing that whatever effectiveness it has may come from Musk distilling other people’s models.
A reference is also included to an earlier view attributed to “Zilis” from 2018, describing Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever as being concerned that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI” and that this concern affected whether they wanted to work with him.
By the time the closing arguments landed. the author’s conclusion is blunt: the individuals involved appear to have been well matched in their dysfunction. and the broader question now is whether anyone watching Musk’s orbit. including people thinking about investing in the upcoming SpaceX IPO. is paying attention to what the AI side of the story is actually delivering.
Musk v. Altman trial OpenAI evidence xAI AI companies courtroom battle cybersecurity and AI